Street protests over deteriorating living circumstances in Lebanon were sustained on Monday as barricades moved from one city to another.
The parties, the Free Patriotic Movement, the Future Movement, Hezbollah, the Amal Movement and the Lebanese Forces, outraged public opinion on Sunday by collaborating to maintain their control over the Engineers’ Syndicate in Beirut, which witnessed fierce elections to choose its delegates to the General Assembly of the Syndicate.
The parties lost in front of candidates of the “Syndicate Revolts” coalition, which represents the gatherings formed during the October 17, 2019 revolution.
The elections were sustained at the Syndicate of Engineers’ headquarters until Sunday night.
A study of the results found that the forces of October 17 won 220 male and female delegates out of 283 seats. Nearly 79 percent of the engineers’ votes were in favor of the uprising, and the rest of the votes were distributed among the parties in power.
Political and social activist Dr. Ziad Abdel Samad said: “The importance of what happened is that this syndicate includes about 60,000 engineers from different social classes from all of Lebanon and all political trends.”
“It is a good sample of what the upcoming parliamentary elections may look like,” he told a news agency.
“It seems that people have abandoned their parties and moved in the opposite direction, meaning that the parties in power no longer have a solid basis.”
Sunday’s elections are a prelude to a second battle, which is the elections for the Syndicate Council and the president, which will take place on July 18.
Lebanon is on the verge of a severe financial crisis, which the World Bank has dubbed “one of the worst miseries in modern times”. The parties in power in Lebanon have been in disagreement for eight months over the formation of a government.
